Achieving political reform

Activists must resist fighting their battles for political reform on the grounds of their enemies' choosing. Serious thought must now be given to how to fight on our own ground, to our own strengths, and what structural changes need to be made to make success a realistic hope.

The fundamental question facing those involved in political reform in
the UK is why do we keep losing? From the AV referendum through to
House of Lords reform we have failed to achieve any of the victories
that seemed so certain on the 8th May 2010 when over 1000 people marched
on Parliament Square in the name of reform.

In the autumn of 2011 following the disaster of the AV campaign I got myself elected to the councils of the Electoral Reform Society and Unlock Democracy.
I knew at that stage that things were broken but I didn’t know enough
to understand the root causes of the failure. Now after just over a year
on the inside and with the benefit of having witnessed the Lords Reform
debacle I’m ready to start taking positions on what is wrong and what
we need to do about it.

My basic analysis is that our strategy as reformers is fundamentally
flawed because we have allowed our behaviour and the way that we
approach campaigning to be defined by our enemies. This is what those in
military circles call “allowing the enemy to get inside your decision
loop”. There’s a lovely example of this if you read the detail in 22
Days in May, David Laws book about the coalition negotiation. Oliver
Letwin towards the end of the negotiations turns to Chris Huhne and
tells him – we will be absolute straightforward and let you have the
referendum, then we will beat you in it. Similarly on Lords reform what
piece of naivety led us to believe that the Labour Party, which in 13
years of power failed to deliver House of Lords reform, would prioritise
the opportunity for change above the potential to harm the coalition.

I don’t in this analysis want to detract from the superb progress
that’s been made in Scotland. But frankly Scotland, in the context of
devolution, is a special case and the same approach that succeeded there
is not going to deliver change for England and Wales. Similarly great
work has been done, particularly by Unlock Democracy, through the
parliamentary enquiries and subcommittee process. But that progress has
been inherently limited by what people in power are willing to let us
change.

Outside of Scotland we have allowed the reform conversation to be
about lobbying Westminster to deliver changes that they are quite
obviously not interested in allowing. We have moved inside the
Westminster bubble and become part of the problem not part of the solution.

Make Votes Count and Take Back Parliament along with the grassroots
support that mobilised during the AV referendum demonstrate that we do
have an activist base. Similarly we should not forget that despite
mounting a hopeless campaign in support of a grubby little compromise
6,152,607 people voted for change in May 2011.

We have a just cause, thousands of activists and millions of pounds
but we keep loosing. This is because we are fighting in a disorganised
way on ground chosen by the enemy.

A winning strategy

In many ways thinking in the activist base is ahead of the
organisations leadership. You just have to look at the motions presented
to the AGMs of Unlock Democracy and the Electoral Reform Society this
year to see the level of frustration and the desire for change in the
way we do things. The activists have already picked up on what we need
to do – which is to get our act together and go and fight some battles
of our own choosing.

To get our act together we have to start thinking of ourselves as
members of a Reform Movement. That movement is made up of many
organisations and individuals but we have common cause and the only way
we will achieve our objectives is together. Without a concept of a
movement we are just a bunch of disparate and unfocused special interest
groups. We also have to start nurturing and growing the activist base
within that movement. This is difficult, expensive and only pays off in
the long term. But without a grassroots base we will continue to be
just another self perpetuating Westminster lobby group.

We also have to shift the battleground into places where we have the
advantage. The best current example of this is STV for local
government. With LGSTV already in place and successful in Scotland it
is very difficult for our opponents to argue that it doesn’t work. It’s
also a great opportunity to get our messages across and grow support
amongst the counsellors, who are a critically important part of most
political parties. That’s just one example, there are many other
interesting places we could go if we decided it was our turn to set the
agenda.

Designed to win

If you study organisational design there is a recurring pattern to
organisations that successfully deliver their strategy. They understand
the fundamental capabilities that are needed to deliver the strategy
and they set out to purposefully develop those capabilities in terms of
their people, processes and structure. The most powerful structures are
built from a network of collaborating organisations each playing a
distinct role, based upon specific capabilities organised to achieve a common intent.

If we look at the reform movement in the same way it is obvious what
is wrong. The capabilities for building and sustaining the people in
our activist base are woefully inadequate; the internal processes and
structures that I’ve seen in the Electoral Reform Society and Unlock
Democracy are optimised for lobbying and there are still very few people
that can engage in a conversation about the roles the various pieces of
the reform movement are currently performing, let alone what they
should be doing.

On building our activist base the momentum for change is already there. The motion on local groups proposed to Unlock Democracy’s AGM by
Danny Zinkus-Sutton, the very different approach to local groups now being
taken by the Electoral Reform Society’s new council and the planned activist conference next February are
all good indications of intent. The revitalisation of reform groups
within the political parties is also a very promising sign. But these
are still all preliminary steps. We have to turn these intentions into
delivery. We must take the building of the activist base seriously and
put a lot more of our resources behind it.

We also have to completely revisit the way we do things. The Local
Government STV campaign that the Electoral Reform Society is hopefully
about to launch will be an excellent opportunity to do this. Once people
realise that this change isn’t going to be delivered by lobbying the
Parliamentary Labour Party to put it in their manifesto, the limitations
of our existing process and structure will be obvious. I’m very hopeful
that the ERS AGM will pass a binding resolution requiring
the society to make STV for local government its top priority. The
society will then have to face this challenge by transforming itself to
deliver on that priority.

The conversation about roles within the reform movement is also
beginning to happen. Partly because I keep insisting on having it, but
mostly because for anyone who has been through the AV referendum and
Lords reform experiences the need to take the long view and build a much
stronger reform movement is obvious.

A critical year

My own personal view is that, given where we are now, achieving all
of our reform objectives is a 20 to 30 year job. I’m becoming
increasingly mindful that 2013 is the 175th anniversary of the People’s charter of 1838.

The opening of that Charter said

We hold it to be an axiom in politics, that self-government by
representation is the only just foundation of political power the only
true basis of constitutional rights and the only legitimate parent of
good laws

Our society has come a long way since the oppressive days of the
early 19th-century but it’s startling that more than a decade into the
21st century our democracy still has many of the ills those chartists
fought against. I’d like us during 2013 to commit to creating a broad
based large scale reform movement that can by 2038 the 200th anniversary
of the Peoples Charter deliver the radical and irresistible change
required to make British Democracy something to be proud of.

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